Here's a common small business headache: you have numerous computers scattered across your network that you don't know anything about. Some are configured with more RAM or faster processors than others. Your newest machines are running different versions of Adobe Photoshop than the rest. Maybe you don't know whether the employees that connect to your network from home have installed the latest critical Windows patch. And if one of your older laptops was stolen, would you even notice? In short, it's an IT headache—assuming you even have someone handling IT management in the first place.

There are, of course, numerous software suites and applications that aim to solve this problem. Microsoft's own System Center Configuration Manager is a popular choice for managing many Windows PCs, and can also handle software deployment and hardware inventory, among other things. Companies such as Symantec also offer deployment and security software packages that promise to keep software up to date and potential security holes patched. And of course, there's no shortage of software—from Prey to iCloud—that promises to keep an eye on stolen machines.

However, there are a few problems with the current batch of options. Many are Windows or OS X-only, which can make such software ill-suited for mixed-machine environments. Other suites, such as McAfee Total Protection, provide a cloud-based interface and management, but tend to focus only on Web and e-mail security. But another company, new to the US market, is tackling the ambitious task of managing, well, everything, using a central dashboard in the cloud. And in many cases, it can work with your existing software, too.

The Copenhagen-based Panorama9 is billed as a comprehensive IT management system for small- and medium-sized businesses—the kind that probably can't support their own IT staff. You install the company's software on each of your Windows PCs (and in a few weeks, Macs too). The client lives in your System Tray, and almost immediately begins sending data back to the Panorama9 dashboard, which is accessible from nearly any modern browser.

What sort of data? You can track installed applications down to the version on every machine, both free and licensed. There's availability monitoring of machines and attached or networked devices. Network and application security is measurable too, and you can build a hardware inventory of all networked machines tied to specific users and locations.

"Most of these tasks are tedious, repetitive, and you don't want to spend too much time doing it," explained CEO Allan Thorvaldsen. "It's not fun patching, it's not fun monitoring, it's just something that you need to do."

Enlarge/ Panorama9 allows IT managers to dive deep into the details of each machine.

Thorvaldsen wants to make this process not only easier, but also more accessible to small- and medium-sized businesses that may not have a dedicated IT staff. And instead of completely replacing other security and management software, Panorama9 has been designed to integrate with existing suites. For example, if your company uses a piece of Symantec software to handle network security, Panorama9 can feed that information into its dashboard and alert you when updates are available. Meanwhile, it doesn't matter whether you use TightVNC or UltraVNC or something else entirely—the Dashboard is smart enough to identify what's installed on a client's PC and adjust accordingly.

In the future, the company wants to work with the likes of Microsoft and Adobe so that the dashboard will even know when a software license is set to expire—data that must currently be entered manually.

But Thorvaldsen is toeing an interesting line. There are many pieces of software that provide monitoring and analytics tools on the market, and so Panorama9 is trying to differentiate itself by making all of this data available in useful ways. For example, he wants to make it possible for an IT manager to compare their company's setup with companies of similar sizes or lines of work—all anonymously, of course. And his clients are apparently interested.

For example, the Panorama9 dashboard might reveal that 45 percent of users at your company are still running Windows XP, which is above average at other, similar firms. Or an automated e-mail might suggest that "companies similar to you would probably install these kind of products as well, or would probably upgrade this kind of hardware," says Thorvaldsen," and it would save you this amount of time, and would benefit you—maybe not today, but six months from now."

Enlarge/ Here's a list of all the outdated things on our Windows 7 PC, some of which are considered critical.

Part of Thorvaldsen's philosophy is that Panorama9 shouldn't just be monitoring for the sake of monitoring, but should provide some real value, not only to the people managing IT, but also to the users being tracked—something that's easier said than done. It's a problem the company has been giving serious thought to in advance of its OS X release, where Thorvaldsen says Mac users are less accustomed to being tracked and monitored by IT in the same way as Windows PCs. In response he suggests, over time, turning the client software into "more of a community-driven service inside the company," where employees can chat with one another, or determine the location of nearby PCs, creating a more social experience "without going down the road of Yammer or Salesforce." Those functions would hopefully offer users more of an incentive to have such software installed on their PCs.

For example, he spoke to a company last week that had a mere 20 employees and was spending, on average, around $400 a month for a few hours of external IT consultancy. He says that after signing up with Panorama9, the company is now spending only about $30 a month—the service charges per user—and it manages its computing resources internally from the cloud-based dashboard instead.

Our own time with the software allowed us to track the hardware and software resources of a PC running Windows 7 over the span of a few days and view everything from recently used applications to noncritical updates that had yet to be installed. In actual business scenarios, Thorvaldsen says the software can even be configured to notify staff members when they take too long to apply critical security patches or respond to issues via text message or e-mail.

"And people really enjoyed it. They liked being notified about it," he said. "We even pinpointed what machines they needed to look into. And it was all automated from the server."